The Media`s Blind Eye On Abortion

For comparisons with the recent protests at the Wichita abortion clinics you have to go back to the sit-ins and the freedom marches of the 1960s, the raiding of the draft board files in the `70s, the denting of nuclear ICBM nose-cones in the `80s, the blockading of the South African Embassy in 1984. These activists took the hazardous step from legal demonstrations to what they called nonviolent civil disobedience. In so doing, they were no longer protesting violence; they were reviling a society that made violence legitimate.

Wichita is that same kind of affront to the nation`s conscience. Kansas Gov. Joan Finney saw the point: ``It is the character and the courage of our state which is at risk. We shall not achieve the ideals for which this state is founded as long as Kansas turns its back on the powerless, the helpless, the unborn.``

The leaders of the abortion rescues closely resemble those of the earlier civil disobediences in that they have large egos and narrow purposes; they are not coalition-builders; they infuriate the leaders of the mainstream movement. They rip off the scab.

There are differences of scale, though. In the succession of sit-ins beginning in 1960, 3,600 persons were arrested. Since Operation Rescue began its movement of civil disobedience less than four years ago, more than 65,000 have been arrested, probably more than in any other rights movement in this century. Yet the starkest difference between the rescues and the other civil- disobedience struggles is the remarkable antipathy with which the rescues have been reported.

First, there is the strange reluctance to report it at all. This is not a local outburst. Rescuers appear in Brookline, Portland, Pittsburgh, Cherry Hill, Hartford, Denver . . . 27 cities in one day, 65 cities in another. Two thousand arrests in one day, a blowout in the history of American civil protest-yet The New York Times gives it one wire photo on page 26.

A 72-year-old bishop was seized, cuffed behind his back, then lifted from the ground by billyclubs between his wrists to dislocate both shoulders. A congressman described the scene in Pittsburgh: Seventeen female college students had had their clothes ripped off, were forced to walk in the nude, in some cases crawl, and some of them were sexually assaulted. In other towns women were strip-searched and cavity-searched. Two protesters were driven over while prostrate on the ground (police did not intervene; the driver was arrested only after the incident was publicly disclosed).

One police unit chief explained that inflicting pain was appropriate because the protesters ``are religious and consider it necessary to absorb pain.``

Stories of this kind (there are hundreds of depositions) ordinarily make good copy when they come from Montgomery or Soweto or Lubyanka. How is it that they have been edited out of the media`s reporting on the anti-abortion demonstrations?

The justice system showed no less passionate a face to the rescuers once they were delivered by the police. Sentences have been extraordinary. In New York a media spokesperson who was standing across the street from the clinic, supplying background information to the media, was fined $25,000. Rescuers note that while actor Martin Sheen was given three hours of community service for his 18th conviction for anti-nuclear protest, a first-time abortion protester in Fargo was sent to prison for 21 months.

The conventional story line on the rescues themselves is that they are largely the work of out-of-town enthusiasts who quickly alienate the locals. The New York Times, for example, on Burlington: ``In many ways the drama being acted out . . . is standard abortion theater with archetypal characters-on one side, an evangelical Christian minister and a have-protest-will-travel group of 100 people crusading against `baby-killers`; on the other, the abortion providers, a group of committed feminists who say they will not be intimidated by `fanatics.` `` Townsfolk manifest ``widespread irritation with the protesters.``

The same was reported of Wichita: ``Residents here say they cannot recall a time of such discontent . . . a time of divided families and congregations, of splintered friendship and shaken love.`` That, of course, is what the citizens of Little Rock, Cicero or Montgomery had been saying throughout the

`60s. But the Times had reported their annoyance in a very different tone.

The coverage of religious leaders participating in rescues has been curiously different from that of earlier militants. Think of all the clergy who stood in the front ranks of the earlier waves of resistance: Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Abraham Joshuah Heschel, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, William Sloan Coffin Jr., Desmond Tutu. . . . They spoke from Isaiah and Luke and Paul, and nobody wrinkled their nose at it.